Saturday, June 18, 2022

Citing 'overreaching activism,' SpaceX reportedly fires workers who decried Musk's behavior

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By Christine Hall and Haje Jan Kamps

Friday, June 17, 2022

There we go, today it's Friday! We're planning to spend some quality time with a headset and a collection of amazing TechCrunch podcasts — here's our roundup of this week's episodes, enthusiastically curated and collected by Henry. We're taking Monday off for Juneteenth. If you're outside the U.S. (or not fully up to speed inside the U.S., for that matter), this article from the New York Times is a great introduction.

Also, Haje appears to be running a fever today, so if some of the jokes in this newsletter make even less sense than usual, let's blame it on him running on three-and-a-quarter brain cells today. — Haje and Christine

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Image Credits: SpaceX

The TechCrunch Top 3

  • Getting to Mars with fewer people: Not sure if it is a coincidence, but commenters to our story from yesterday felt the group of SpaceX employees, that circulated an open letter challenging Elon Musk's Twitter behavior, should be fired. Today, Darrell brings us news that this may have indeed happened for some of that employee group. He reports that other employees did not appreciate being inundated with unsolicited offers to join the group and took their own action with corporate. See here for more on Musk's plan for Twitter.
  • Integrating into Alibaba: Cainiao, the logistics service operated by Alibaba, made its debut in Pakistan to support Daraz, an e-commerce company there that Alibaba bought in 2018. Rita reports that it's likely Cainiao will now follow Alibaba as it expands its footprint around the globe.
  • Some fresh perspective for VC: We got double a treat from Dominic-Madori today. She interviewed a number of Black Gen Z VCs who successfully broke into an industry that had traditionally not included them. You can read her interview with Fearless Fund's Arian Simone here or under today's TC+ section.

Startups and VC

Today in startups, Brex mentions it is “less suited to meet the needs of smaller customers” and that the company is exiting the small business space while still catering to startups, Mary Ann reports.

We're also intrigued by Immutab's half-billion-dollar fund to boost web3 gaming adoption, as Jacquelyn reports today. Also, can we just say, our crypto, blockchain and web3 reporting has really found its stride over the last couple of months, so definitely keep an eye out for more on that front going forward. Start with our web3 tag on the site and work your way through some of our previous stuff, too!

The best of the rest:

Fearless Fund's Arian Simone on why a downturn is business as usual for minority founders

In the U.S., Black women are the most entrepreneurial demographic, but they're also more likely to fall into a funding gap when they need access to capital.

Out of $330 billion in VC funding that startups received last year, "less than five Black women raised money past the Series A stage, and one of them was Rihanna," reports Dominic-Madori Davis.

To help level the playing field for minority women working in tech and consumer packaged goods, entrepreneur Arian Simone co-founded Fearless Fund in 2019 with business advisor Ayana Parsons and actress Keshia Knight Pulliam.

The fund has backed 31 companies to date, and despite the chill in the markets, it has no plans to slow down.

"Companies that are venture-backed have seen their fair share of horror stories," said Simone. "They don't typically get rattled by the current macroeconomic climate."

(TechCrunch+ is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

Read More

Fearless Fund's Arian Simone on why a downturn is business as usual for minority founders image

Image Credits: Fearless Fund

Big Tech Inc.

Privacy is a good thing, so it's nice to see WhatsApp come out with a new feature that lets you hide your profile photo, bio and "last seen" status from people you don't want to see, Aisha reports. The new privacy opt-in goes by "My contacts except…" and is where you can list those people.

We now go across the pond to a pair of stories by Natasha L. In the first one, we find out that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange will be coming back to the U.S. The U.K.'s home secretary granted the extradition request after several attempts by the U.S. to bring Assange back to be tried for conspiracy to hack and computer misuse, she reported. In Natasha's other story, she does a deep-dive into the region's data reform study, one of those being replacing cookie pop-ups with browser-related opt-outs. In case it is tl;dr, she says, "plenty of uniquely British red tape is also incoming for your digital operations."

Don't forget to read these, too:

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